[gnramires]

Personally, I give to projects I use (and ones that need most help), and I'm happy that say my younger self or people with no conditions can still use it without paying. I think there should probably be better coordinated efforts in this direction, from say companies to governments. But meanwhile individual donations are already pretty powerful if even a small % of people that can donate do.

In particular, governments traditionally already allocate resources for the common benefit (their main function really), in public research and public science, public infrastructure, etc.. I think this is just another very significant extension of that.

Also companies benefit greatly from OS/(and OSHW in the future?), and frequently maintain private tools at significant costs. Open source can be seen as a coordination mechanism where everybody can (or rather, should) cooperate to lower costs and benefit everyone (basically, their whole industry or rather society gets more efficient) :)